Liberals only love American Dream stories when minority politicians turn out like Barack Obama.

American success stories like Bobby Jindal, however, are their worst nightmare. It’s a slap in the face of leftist identity politics for a minority conservative to succeed in politics on a platform of faith, self-reliance, free market advocacy, and individual responsibility. And to succeed in the South? Intolerable!

The politics of color is changing in America. For people of color, the best path to success may be to become a “person of no color.”

I caution people in evaluating the apparent success of Bobby Jindal.

Jindal, the first Indian American in U.S. history to be elected governor last Saturday — in Louisiana of all places — is what I call a “man without color.”Normally, you’d describe a person “without color” as white, but even white is a color. Jindal’s a guy who seems to aspire to being totally colorless (that’s not to say bloodless, though we are talking about a professional politician here).

In the past, this sort of character might have been labeled a chameleon, but even that’s not quite Jindal.

He doesn’t change skin tone. His skin is still as dark and constant given his immigrant Hindu parents from Punjab.

But the changes are they’re on the inside, which makes the constancy of his skin tone a tool of deception.

When you see a person of color, you expect someone with similar values, views, beliefs — someone in touch with the emerging new majority. With Jindal, you get someone who very deliberately and proudly downplays his race in order to seek his own individual path. That kind of independence under certain circumstances may be commendable. But only if you happen to agree with his ideas that range from free-market health care, intelligent design instead of evolution, anti-choice and a fenced-in America.

When did Newt Gingrich die and reincarnate?

Dinosaurs like Emil Guillermo can barely hide their contempt for assimilation.

When Jindal won, even the New York Times saw it fitting to remark how the first words from his mouth weren’t about his historic ethnic victory. It was about LSU’s defeat of Auburn earlier that day. It’s an old trick, a la “We’re all part of the same team. Just us honky-tonk footballers here!”

Horrors! Jindal’s talking about football instead of wallowing in anti-imperialistic self-pity!

This is classic crab-in-the-bucket sydrome, where the collectivist minority crabs try their mightiest to yank any other crab who dares to climb out of the ideological pail. Diversity, as always, is skin-deep in their world. Unable to maintain an intellectual stranglehold on minority conservatives, self-satisfied liberal racism cannot help but rears its ugly head:

The fact is color still matters in politics.

Maybe not to the new governor of Louisiana, whose real name, by the way, is Piyush Jindal.

He adopted the name Bobby because he liked The Brady Bunch. Now he’s created a unique modern character in Asian American political history: “Uncle Bob.”

Who are the real racists? Who are the enemies of progress?

When liberal bigots have nothing left but to sneer about your given ethnic name, their game is over. The bucket has been toppled.